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TAC 2010 - Team K: M. Medialis - RU JP FR | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| papillon Bilingual Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5677 days ago 29 posts - 35 votes Speaks: English*, Vietnamese* | Message 9 of 115 09 January 2010 at 12:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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Medialis,
There are certain things that are beyond our control. Noise, distractions, relatives, siblings and parents can hamper your study concentrations. I know how a person can stress out during the winter holidays. When I visited my sister and her family, she handed me the responsibility of taking care her children. Yikes! I initially thought I'd pay her a holiday visit and have a peaceful rest. On the contrary, my language study was disrupted and that put me in a sour mood. My day involved taking the children to shopping or library and reading books to them. Instead of stressing out, I had to be at peace internally and I planned to study early in the morning and at night. During the day I could enjoy spending time with my nephew and niece. I think you have found what time would be appropriate for you to study. The more we have stress, the less productive we have in our study. Despite your external environment is disruptive, do find the time and a place to do what you love. Keep on studying!! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5554 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 10 of 115 09 January 2010 at 11:03am | IP Logged | |||||
I know what you mean about having people around, but to be honest I find it hard to focus even when they're not there...all those wonderful distractions - raiding the biscuit barrel, bending it like Beckham against my poor neighbour's wall, playing guitar or piano and imagining I'm bigger than Snow Patrol...the list is endless. Apart from developing superhuman Samana skills of concentration or making it so unpleasant that they all leave (i.e. eating lots of garlic), the next best thing is to find a time or place where you can study comfortably without too many disruptions. Maybe a library or study area after or inbetween lectures, or simply make people aware that this language project is important to you and put up a "No Disturb" sign on the bedroom or dorm door to let them know "the doctor isn't in" at certain times. It would really make my day to see the inspirational Prof marching down my snowy street in ear-warmers, shadowing the Cantonese Assimil course or his latest Persian audio...would so get the German net curtains a-rustling :) Edited by Teango on 09 January 2010 at 11:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6355 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 11 of 115 10 January 2010 at 9:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks for the encouraging words. I think you both are absolutely right that one should set up both study places and study times in order to tackle this problem. That's definitely something I've overlooked in my grand plans. And I definitely need to put away the stress..
Wow. Just picturing that scene is so amazing that it makes me want to go out and study rightaway. ----------------------------------------------------- TAC Log nr 2/52 Well, it's time to sum up the week. As I just confessed, this week has been pretty disappointing for me. Lots of 'free' time, but some sort of psychological block related to external factors that held me back. However, the whole point of making plans is not primarily to fulfill them, but to have a clear picture of what you want to do, which enables you to analyze results and decisions. So here is my second log, and I actually think I can squeeze out many good things from a relatively unproductive week. Actions during the past week Have LR-ed in japanese for the first time in my life, probably somewhere at 4 hours. A sweet experience, and I find the book I am a cat to be very fascinating. I have picked up a few words, and have started to get a feeling for the rhythm and the "tone" of the language. Have actively started to picture myself being japanese, by standing in front of a mirror, trying to look and sound japanese. It's fun and inspiring, and I hope this will help me not to mix it up with russian. I am a bit proud of having successfully memorized 194 kanjis this week using an srs. This must be one of the keys to success, to have small activities that you manage to do even when you feel you're having a bad week. Current plan Continue japanese LR, and study kanji. Activate my dormant hiragana and katakana knowledge. Do extensive passive listening in russian and write a journal in russian at lang-8.com. Experiment with vocabulary learning techniques for russian. ----------------------------------------------------- Team K - M. Medialis Edited by M. Medialis on 10 January 2010 at 10:00pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6355 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 12 of 115 17 January 2010 at 5:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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TAC Log nr 3/52
I have finally gotten into a sweet sensation of being in a language study flow. It feels easy to do things in russian, and to memorize kanji. Tomorrow, the new term at the university starts, and I really need to make an effort to integrate both language studies and education-related studies into my daily life, or I'll run into a brick wall in may. Actions during the past week This week has been a good russian week. I haven't done any japanese, except from my daily kanji practice (memorized 352 kanjis now). I find it a bit hard to switch between languages on the same day. I tend to want to stick in the mode of single language for some reason. I don't know if it's good or bad, and whether I should try to change it or not. Does anyone have any advice? As for my russian, everything has went according to my plan. And the vocabulary learning technique that interest me the most is simply to read a russian texts with a fast pop-up dictionary at hand. It enables me to read faster, learn meanings from context, and to quickly and naturally recognize words from their "shape". So in order to continue doing this kind of reading, I actually bought the ABBYY Lingvo x3 English-russian dictionaries for $100. It's not often I buy things, but this one seems to be too good to live without. I've also written in russian for the first time. And it was unbelievable, 30 minutes after my journal was posted, I'd gotten 3 complete corrections. They pointed out grammar mistakes that I'd never notice on my own. Wow. Note to my future self: Hey, this is a message from yourself, at a time when you remembered how good it was to write journals in russian. Please continue doing it, you'll thank me later. Current plan Read russian blogs, news and novels every day. Write a new russian journal. Do russian or/and japanese LR. Continue to study the kanji. ----------------------------------------------------- Team K - M. Medialis Edited by M. Medialis on 17 January 2010 at 5:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| aloysius Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6238 days ago 226 posts - 291 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian | Message 13 of 115 17 January 2010 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't have any advice really, but I share your experience. I have decided I will do at least twenty minutes a day in each of my TAC languages, because I believe that daily dose is efficient, but I tend to use most of my time for one language. Italian and French, which are more closely related, are easyier to do in parallel. Especially when I use the same text for both languages it is interesting to contrast vocabulary and grammar. Glad to hear you're in a flow! aloysius 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5554 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 14 of 115 17 January 2010 at 8:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
Good thinking here...having a realistic and achievable set of goals everyday, like Aloysius' 20 minutes in each language a day, provides suitable structure and can prove a good overall motivator. When you acheive your daily goals, you feel good; when you mark up a few extra minutes or even hours, you feel great. May I suggest too...it's always best to have some kind of level-headed contingency plan well in advance for those inevitable exams and/or coursework that are bound to come round later on during the year. They're far far away now in a distant galaxy somewhere, but time does have a habit of creeping up on people, and suddenly it's time to suck in, grab a towel and press the big red "panic" button. Many students would simply just drop everything around intensive periods, which is perfectly understandable when you're forced to live on a diet of caffeine, potnoodles and past papers for a month. But with a little advance planning, this can all be made so much easier. Take it from one who's got a few moth-eaten t-shirts in this all-too-familiar game now... Language learning seems to be very much down to forming good habits, so it's great to hear you've already got yourself into a "sweet flow" early on, and you're almost a 5th of your way through the whole joyo kanji too - superb! I'm sadly only up to number 84 in the Heisig book so far, but I'm enjoying marking them up on my laminated kanji poster! I thoroughly recommend getting one of these bad boys for your wall ;)
My plan this year is to get to a good natural listening/speaking level in each language, and then shift to a lower "maintenance"/"ongoing language development" gear in the lingo, whilst I tackle the next big language on my list, and so on. This is mainly because I want to make sure I've got the best possible chance to boost my listening skills prior to anything else, and not get the sounds and patterns of several languages too mixed up in my head. If you're learning more than one language each day, especially with lots of shared characteristics, then I'd recommend doing one in the morning and the other in the afternoon where possible, with a GOOD BREAK inbetween. Another idea is to associate a unique study location with each language, e.g. studying Japanese at your desk, Russian at the kitchen table, etc. A lot boils down to the psychological triggers and links we form whilst learning. One final idea...I find it very useful to start each study period with a little bit of background music/radio/podcasts to prime the transition from one language to another, rather than jumping right in. Well done with the Russian by the way :) Edited by Teango on 17 January 2010 at 8:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6355 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 15 of 115 22 January 2010 at 4:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Teango: Good advice. I've had huge problems LRing japanese this week because of a constant nagging russian voice in my head who wants to break in and tell the japanese voice what to say.
If I could lock that overly confident russian guy in a prison of triggers, he might stay away from my young and unexperienced japanese baby. I'm thinking about beginning my study sessions by having a small little ritual involving listening to music in the target language, while looking at a picture of the country's flag or something. TAC note Kanji progress I jsut realized that my goal of having mastered all kanji by march 14th had a weak foundation. My plan was to take one Heisig chapter a day, but since some chapters consist of >>40 characters, it becomes unrealistic. I get more enjoyment and a much better retention rate when I study 20-30 characters/day, and therefore I chose to stick to the slower pace. This is about long term memory anyways. Wanderlust Wow. I've just had the first true wanderlust experience of my life. So completely unexpected. Just walking around in the grossery store, talking silently to myself in russian, seeing an ad with the face of a south-american woman (just some advertising for some fruits probably). And then it suddenly struck me - I want to learn Spanish and portugese! That's yet another reason to study intensively this year, for if I reach my goals, I can move on to these languages with no hesitation. Edited by M. Medialis on 22 January 2010 at 4:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5554 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 16 of 115 22 January 2010 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
I have this amazing picture of you donning the karate kid headband, whisking up a vitalising brew of frothy green macha, and signing magical kanji in the air to scare away these undesired whispering Slavic spirits - gambatte, Medialis-san..."you have goodu root"...bansai! :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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